Work

Sharehive

I was involved with Sharehive (previously Tibba) whilst lead developer in my previous position with Fika Apps - when the company pivoted and i became freelance, i was given the contract to develop the site from scratch, something i was quite excited to do.

What is Sharehive? It's best explained by the site's own about page:

Sharehive is a marketplace where freelancers and entrepreneurs collaborate through swapping or buying skills from each other. Whether it is swapping graphic design for copywriting or paying someone to get help with website development, Sharehive connects people to new opportunities and collaborations.

The features of the site were taken from an already existing mobile app which was scrapped, this site was to become the new central hub for Sharehive activity, and the flexibility to access the data from a mobile app in the future was one of the main requirements.

Written entirely in Laravel 5.5, the site includes features like:

The ability to set up skills an a profile

Chat between users

Users can explore and search skills

Users can create contracts to solidify what they are trading in exchange for their skills

Users can also request and make monetary payment in several currencies, powered by Stripe and Stripe Connect

Ionic: up and running

Online course

I'm writing a book! Well, sort of - it's also a video series.

Think of it as a stepping stone into your world of mobile development - this book will give you enough knowledge to confidently build a mobile app, and while i'm not saying that all the lessons may apply directly to your app idea specifically, it will give you the foundation you need.

You might be one of these people:

A freelance developer (such as myself) looking for another service to offer your clients.

Someone who has an idea for an app, and wants to build it in their spare time.

A developer at a company who is diversifying into mobile applications.

A manager at a company who wishes to diversify, but don't know how to provide your developers with the tools they need to learn.

A developer or founder of a startup looking to build a companion app for your website product.

In all these cases, this book will give you enough of a foundation to start making money from building apps.

Me, but better

For this project, i was commisioned by Rick at Dogtooth to build V1 of his passion project idea - an app that allows someone to set affirmations - little supportive phrases that they must repeat to themselves multiple times a day - and allow the person to track the affirmation process, as well as being reminded that they need to affirm.

The brief was to include features like:

Beautiful imagery and scenery, combined with a distraction-free view for showing affirmations.

Reminders that could be added, to ensure you always use the affirmations

A simple interface so that it would be enjoyable to add in affirmations

I worked closely with Rick's brother Dan of Sparrow Digital to create a working base app that was pushed out onto the app stores with great feedback from users.

Rick's brother has since taken over much of the maintainance and improvement of the app, but I've recently worked with the guys to add in a new sync feature that allows you to syncronise your affirmations between devices and back them up to the cloud all at once.

Geohitch

Geohitch was my first mobile app project - a concept brought to me by Jonathan Lowe, a local businessman and Entrepeneur and Martin, once of his employees.

The premise was simple - you pick up virtual "HitchHikers" from real-world locations, then take them to another location and drop them off.

The further away you took these virtual characters, and the faster you did it, the more points you gained.

You could create your own HitchHikers, customise their clothing, pick a different head, gender or even species.

The app also had in-app items that you could purchase to boost the points your character yielded when dropped off at their destination, these items were bought with 'coins' - which could be earned in the game or purchased using in-app purchases.

The app made it through to the final of the Virgin VOOM business competition thanks to the efforts of it's founder, and we also had a pretty neat launch party for the app.

The app itself was written entirely in Ionic Framework (V1), and also had a pretty beefy accompanying REST API and administration tools built in Laravel - including random seeding tools that dotted characters and collectible 'swag bags' across the landscape.

I worked closely with another Dan from Sparrow Digital on this one to help develop the idea with the client, and we also incorporated some pretty great initial design work from Vincent & Bell.

HECooperative

I've been working with the HECooperative since my days working at Hydrant as a Drupal developer.

While i was there, me and a small team built an online learning platform that currently stands at a total of roughly 24k users.

I've been working with the HECoop recently to plan a new iteration of the online VLE, as well as help with other aspects of the company's long-term business plans, as well as providing second-line technical support to it's users and the University staff who populate it with content.

Simply Satisfied

A joint venture with my old boss Leo White - Simply satisfied was founded on one idea: to get good, actionable feedback from our agency's clients and also from our contractors.

Companies can create an account and send out "invites" to people whom from they wish to solicit feedback, we also take care of reminding the users after a week if they haven't responded.

The basic survey provided two required questions - both of which were 1-10 scales and were used to generate percentage-based 'scores' for the company. Any member of staff or manager could then use these as a metric for customer satisfaction.

We also offer a little more customisation - you can add different fields to turn your feedback form into a short survey and collect more information. You can also customise surveys by adding your logo and even customise the email templates.